Personally I like this little speech (a sermon from an American chaplain to some men from the 101st Airborne) from the movie Battleground, which is set during the Battle of the Bulge:
“Now it’s nearly Christmas, and here we are in beautiful Bastogne enjoying the winter sports. And the $64 question is: “Was this trip necessary?” I’ll try to answer that. Let’s look at the facts. Nobody wanted this war but the Nazis. A great many people tried to deal with them, and a lot of them are dead. Millions have died, for no other reason except that the Nazis wanted them dead. So, in the final showdown, there was nothing left to do except fight. There’s a great lesson in this. Those of us who’ve learned it the hard way aren’t going to forget it. We must never again let any force dedicated to a super-race or a super-idea or super-anything become strong enough to impose itself upon a free world. We must be smart enough and tough enough in the beginning to put out the fire before it starts spreading. My answer to the sixty-four dollar question is yes, this trip was necessary. As the years go by, a lot of people are going to forget. But you won’t. And don’t ever let anybody tell you you were a sucker to fight in the war against fascism.”
I agree that WWII wasn’t a simplistic black-and-white conflict between good guys and bad guys (few if any wars are), and it’s true that WWII – as some people hoped at the time – didn’t usher in an era of global peace and good fellowship (no war ever has), but by the same token I largely agree with the assessment given back in the 1970s by Stephen Ambrose (some of whose credibility has since, I admit, been called into question) when he said that the fundamental outcome of WWII was the crushing of fascism in Italy, Nazism in Germany and militarism in Japan and that “surely justice has never been better served.”
